Snarl by John Boden

 

Marlin Stains is a lonely man who is filled with words. Words that he longs to share with the world but so far only shares with himself. He has over 300 notebooks brimming with them in his trailer room. A wood-paneled tomb of prose and syllable. Marlin Stains killed his brother in the womb, buried his father when he was a young man and now, a bit older, he watches the same monster devour his mother. While grappling with this, he experiences a combination of exchanges and events that point him on a new trajectory with an outcome that is both expected and anything but. Marlin Stains has learned plenty in his thirty-two Love never dies, it just hides for a while and gets punchy. Death is never afraid and never gives a damn. Life is a thing that stretches, sometimes so far that you forget about it until it snaps back and hurts you. A snarl is an angry sound or a tangled trap, Marlin is familiar with both.

Marlin Stains spends his lonely life caring for his sick mother, blaming himself for his twin brother's death before he was ever born, and writing out his thoughts in hundreds of notebooks.

 

"My thoughts, they're always like minnows. Dozens of them. All of them small but swimming fast, gasping when I catch 'em."

He never shares his writing. Maybe things would be different for him if he had. Maybe he knows this and feels he's not worthy of happiness or attention.

When a woman he has loved from afar ever since they were in the eighth grade tells him that her husband has been abusing her, he starts to consider the possibility of a different kind of life.

Snarl is a sorrowful tale of an unfortunate man and the disturbing path he found his life on. The grief and loneliness are palpable. I literally need a hug right now.

My emotions ran the gamut and ran me ragged while reading. This is my second time reading a John Boden novella, and I'll definitely be back for more.

5 out of 5 stars

My thanks to the author and Dead Sky Publishing.

Available for pre-order

More books by John Boden

Riding the Nightmare by Lisa Tuttle

 

Over a fifty-year career, Lisa Tuttle has earned a reputation as one of the greatest modern authors of horror and weird fiction. Her most recent collection, The Dead Hours of Night, was a finalist for the Stoker Award, and now she is back with a new collection of twelve unsettling tales, several of them never previously collected, including the long out-of-print and hard-to-find tale 'The Dragon's Bride'.

This volume contains the following stories: Riding the Nightmare, Bits and Pieces, ‘The Mezzotint’, After the End, The Third Person, The Wound, The Man in the Ditch, The Last Dare, A Home in the Sky, Voices in the Night, The Hungry Hotel, The Dragon’s Bride. Also included is a new introduction by Neil Gaiman.

Riding The Nightmare had me galloping through the pages, It is loaded from cover to cover with delightfully dark and disturbing tales from one of the best storytellers in horror, Lisa Tuttle.

A secret weekend tryst will haunt a happily engaged woman in The Hungry Hotel.

A picture is worth a thousand words in The Mezzotint, but only if the warning is heeded in time. Home ownership is part of the American dream especially if you are an adult stuck returning to your childhood bedroom but a room in your parents' house may be safer than A Home In The Sky.

The Man In The Ditch is another story of a warning that went ignored when a woman who should have trusted her own instinct lets her husband convince her that there is nothing to fear.

Two old friends reconnect on Halloween in The Last Dare and forgotten memories return too late.

The title story Riding The Nightmare is a chilling play on words when the actual mare shows up at the window for a night ride.

These were my favorites in the collection but all of the stories are wonderfully weird and unsettling. It was also a refreshing change of pace to have so many stories from a female main character's point of view.

5 out of 5 stars

My thanks to Valancourt Books

Available for pre-order

About the author

Spin a Black Yarn by Josh Malerman

 

Five harrowing novellas of horror and speculative fiction from the singular mind of the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box

Josh Malerman is a master weaver of stories--and in this spine-chilling collection he spins five twisted tales from the shadows of the human soul:

A sister insists to her little brother that "Half the House Is Haunted" by a strange presence. But is it the house that's haunted--or their childhoods?

In "Argyle," a dying man confesses to homicides he never committed, and he reveals long-kept secrets far more sinister than murder.

A tourist takes the ultimate trip to outer space in "The Jupiter Drop," but the real journey is into his own dark past.

In "Doug and Judy Buy the House Washer(TM)," a trendy married couple buys the latest home gadget only to find themselves trapped by their possessions, their history . . . and each other.

And in "Egorov," a wealthy old cretin murders a young man, not knowing the victim was a triplet. The two surviving brothers stage a savage faux-haunting--playing the ghost of their slain brother--with the aim of driving the old murderer mad.

Do you like weird fiction? Strange Tales? These novellas are not necessarily horror, but they do bite when you least expect it.

I loved three out of the five stories. 

In my three favorites, a little girl terrifies her baby brother with frightening pranks and her insistence that half the house is haunted. Is she just evil or can she see what others can't?

A loathsome married couple's incessant need to brag and show off their status will be their undoing when their past can not be washed away.

A family man on his deathbed shares a jarring secret that blindsides his loved ones as they gather to say goodbye.

There is some supernatural horror in the mix but the majority of these stories rely on psychological scares and surprising twists. 

My thanks to Random House/Ballantine/ Del Rey Publishing.

Available for Pre-order

About the author

That Night in the Woods by Kristopher Triana

 

When Jennifer receives a message from Scott Dwyer after twenty years without contact, her first reaction is one of excitement. Scott was her first love, and now that she’s in her forties and in the middle of a divorce, nostalgia for her youth gets the better of her.

Scott invites Jennifer to his house in Redford, the very same town she grew up in. It’s a place she’s made great effort to put behind her, for not all her childhood memories are sunny. When she accepts Scott’s invite and returns to her old hometown, she struggles with mixed feelings, especially when she learns of the death of Steven Winters, one of her and Scott’s childhood friends.

Scott invites three other people from their past to honor Steven’s memory—Corey, Traci, and Mark. But the group is more than old friends. They share a dark secret that has troubled them for decades. Now it’s time to face their traumatic pasts. Together, they must unravel the mystery of what happened that night in the patch of forest behind Scott’s house, a place once known as Suicide Woods.

From the author of Gone to See the River Man comes a chilling novel that reminds us old ghosts are the ones that haunt us most.

Twenty years ago seven teenagers went into suicide woods on Halloween, to party, camp out, and scare themselves a little. Only six of them made it out alive. 

They went their separate ways after that, never wanting to think about that night, trying to put it, and each other out of sight and out of mind.

Now all these years later, the messages come to each of them from the one person who stayed in town. Scott still lives in the house near suicide woods and he has bad news. Their childhood friend Steven has passed away and he wants them all to come back in honor of his memory. He claims this reunion was Steven's final wish and he has a message to share with them. 

Is he telling the truth or does he have nefarious reasons for wanting his former friends to return? He's certainly acting a bit strange. 

There's an old saying that tells us you can't go home again. Maybe that should be changed to "Don't go back if you were lucky enough to survive the first time."

As a fan of small-town horror,  I loved the atmosphere and the characters, These are people I could have gone to school with. The friends, the lovers, the nerdy kid, it's like I knew them all. But then came the sudden fear of the unknown. The party went from innocent fun, to fight for survival.  You wouldn't think you could get claustrophobia from reading about being outside in the forest but I did start to feel like those trees were closing in on me. I'm not going to tell you anything about what really happened that night in the woods but it has me staring suspiciously out my window on the lookout for more than just wildlife, and I won't be answering any calls or emails from long lost friends who want to reunite.

5 out of 5 stars

My thanks to Cemetery Dance Publications.

Available for Pre-order

About the author